Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Walk-Through-Wall Effect Might Be Possible With Humanmade Object, Physicists Predict: ...Researchers would fashion the micrometer-wide trampoline out of graphene, a superstrong, superflexible sheet of carbon only one atom thick. They would suspend the membrane—small but much larger than the atoms and molecules that are the usual domain of quantum physics—over a metal plate. When experimenters applied an electrical voltage, the membrane would have two stable positions: one in which it bows slightly in the middle and one in which it bends enough to contact the plate below. In the Finnish team's design, the electrical and mechanical forces on the membrane create an energy barrier between these two positions. If researchers could lower the membrane's energy by cooling it to a temperature of less than a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, then the only way it could get between the two positions is quantum tunneling. The experimenters could then observe the membrane's change of configuration by looking for a change in the system's capacitance, a measure of how well it can store electrical charge...